Admonitions To A Special Person – Anne Sexton

✨ Watch out for power, for its avalanche can bury you, snow, snow, snow, smothering your mountain.

✨ Watch out for hate, it can open its mouth, and you’ll fling yourself out to eat off your leg, an instant leper.

✨ Watch out for friends because when you betray them, as you will, they will bury their heads in the toilet and flush themselves away.

✨ Watch out for intellect because it knows so much; it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth.

✨ Watch out for games, the actor’s part, the speech planned, known, given, for they will give you away and stand like a naked little boy, pissing on your child-bed.

✨ Watch out for love (unless it is accurate, and every part of you says yes, including the toes), it will wrap you up like a mummy, and your scream won’t be heard, and none of your runnings will end.

✨ Love? Be it, man. Be it, woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. Love another is something like prayer and can’t be planned; you fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

✨ Particular person, if I were you, I’d pay no attention to admonitions from me, made somewhat out of your words and somewhat out of mine—a collaboration.

I do not believe a word I have said, except some, except I think of you like a young tree with pasted-on leaves and know you’ll root and the real green thing will come. Let go. Let go.

✨ Oh, particular person, possible leaves, this typewriter likes you on the way to them but wants to break crystal glasses in celebration, for you, when the dark crust is thrown off, and you float all around like a happened balloon. 😁